


The Houseguest

by CantStopImagining



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Mutual Pining, Post-Movie(s), Slow Burn, god so much pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-07-29 19:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7695886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CantStopImagining/pseuds/CantStopImagining
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Erin, sweetheart, either you’re going to jump in a cab with me and go back to my place, or I’m going to physically carry you there.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I hate entering new fandoms it's so scary. Anyway, heres my first offering to the Ghostbusters fandom. I figured after seeing the film four times, it was about time I did something productive with it. This is going to be a bit of a slow burn so bear with me :)

Erin’s apartment, much like most areas of her life, is kept perfectly neat. So much so, that on the odd occasion that Abby drops by after work, she cracks jokes about it looking like something out of a catalogue, and Erin supposes it probably does. The walls are eggshell, bare besides a few large paintings that hang over her bed (they came with the apartment), and the hard wood floors are always perfectly swept. She never leaves clothes out, always keeps on top of her laundry, and nothing every lurks in her fridge longer than it ought to. The few weeks between reengaging with Abby, and saving Abby from being sucked into a vortex to another plane, the place might have looked slightly more dishevelled than normal, but it probably would have only been noticeable to her.

In all honesty, she doesn’t spend that much time at home. She eats, sleeps and breathes work, having fallen asleep with her head buried in a book at the firestation more times than she cares to count. They order take out almost every night, and they take it in turns to do the deli run for lunch. Erin’s fridge contains a bottle of orange juice, a carton of blueberries, a half-eaten lettuce, and a single tupperware of leftover Chinese food. It isn’t like she needs anything more than that.

Since becoming a Ghostbuster, she might have let a few of her habits slip - the uptight clothes, the blouses buttoned right to the top, with long, tweed skirts, and matching blazers; even the need to please absolutely everybody is being slowly discarded - but the most notable is probably her anxious late-night cleaning habit, that has existed for as far back as Erin can remember. Whether that is down to the fact she comes home each night too exhausted to worry, or - and this is more likely, in all honesty - she’s been feeling too content to need the distraction cleaning used to give her, she can’t be completely sure, but either way, she’s been getting a lot more sleep, and her apartment is beginning to look slightly more lived in. She even slips a picture of the four of them into a frame on her windowsill, the first personal touch she thinks she’s ever added.

Home is Erin’s haven, and it’s always been that way, ever since she moved out and became self-sufficient.

Apparently, this is a difficult concept for cockroaches to grasp though.

The morning she steps on her very first roach - and in her favourite pair of heels which have only just recovered from ectoplasm, no less - she feels like she might throw up. She lets out a shriek that probably wakes every single apartment in the block. So, she might be able to deal with ghosts on a daily basis, but roaches?

Appearances have always been everything to Erin, so she doesn’t tell the girls at work that anything is wrong, mostly out of embarrassment. She calls the fumigator, and he tells her that she’ll have to find somewhere else to stay for the week, and Erin gives into the probability that she will be sleeping cooped up on a secondhand couch in the firehouse for the week. She’d rather that, than admit to her colleagues that her apartment is anything less than perfect, or burden them with her presence outside of work.

It’s not like anybody will notice. She’s often the last to leave, and almost always the first to arrive. Punctuality has always been important, even now that she’s self-employed. Occasionally, she arrives at work to the bass of 80s music pumping quietly through the ceiling, but Holtzmann pretty much keeps to herself, unless there’s food or ghosts involved. Erin figures she’ll be safe enough camping out in the waiting area for a few days.

Erin spends the evening up in Holtzmann’s lab. It’s been her chosen nook to work in for a while, partially because it’s where the building gets the most light in, and partly because there’s something soothing about listening to Holtzmann tinkering next to her. Plus, she’s always on hand to put out fires, which comes in more helpful than she had imagined. Holtzmann eventually gave her a desk, and some sort of tropical plant in a partially-broken pot that Erin suspects may have been stolen from a dumpster somewhere. All the same, it’s touching. Probably more so than Erin likes to let on.

As much as she loves it up here, tonight she’s getting frustrated with how long Holtzmann is sticking around for. It’s gone nine o’clock, and she’s still playing around with her latest invention, despite the rest of the team having left hours ago, and Erin’s getting antsy.

“I’m heading out,” she finally says, after what feels like an impossibly long time, “gotta catch some Zs,” she grins at Erin, sticking her hands deep into the pockets of her overalls, and if Erin weren’t so tired, she might have grinned back.

“Right, yes, I ought to head off too.”

Holtzmann tilts her head to one side, a somewhat manic look in her eyes, though Erin supposes no more manic than usual, “I’ll walk you out?”

Erin forgets to blush, Holtzmann’s usual effect on her not really working tonight. She sees Holtzmann’s shoulders sag when she gets no real reaction, Erin distracted by pretending to be absorbed by her formula.

“It’s okay, I just want to get this done first,” she murmurs, barely raising her tired eyes from the page.

“Okie dokie. Night, don’t let the bed ghosts bite,” Holtzmann drawls, tugging on her leather jacket and heading for the stairs. Erin flinches uncontrollably at the mention of bugs.

She waits until she’s sure Holtzmann is gone before she tiptoes down to the bathroom, carrying her weekend bag with her. Fortunately, the team are used to her ridiculously large handbags and didn’t pass any comment when she showed up with it that morning. She fishes out her toothbrush and toothpaste, brushes her teeth, and changes into her clean, flannel pyjamas to head downstairs.

The couch is comfier than it looks, and she had the foresight to bring blankets and a cushion. She’s set an alarm for an hour earlier than she usually would to give her time to get ready and remove all hints of her having stayed the night, and to ensure nobody else arrives before she gets back. The firehouse is eerily quiet at night, but it doesn’t take Erin long to drift off to sleep, despite being unusually cramped on its narrow surface.

-

“Is this a private slumber party, or can anyone join?”

Erin jolts awake, and for a moment she has absolutely no recollection of where she is or how she got there. Holtzmann’s amused face is drifting in front of hers, sideways, and beaming from ear to ear, and Erin almost chokes on her own saliva when she realises what’s happening.

“I…” she starts, then realises there’s no chance of talking her way out of this. She’s literally in her pyjamas. Instead, she smoothes out her hair, and hopes her morning breath isn’t too disgusting, taking a deep breath before telling Holtz everything.

“How long is your place out of action?” Holtzmann asks, her expression unchanging.

“A week. Look, you have to promise not to tell the others, I couldn’t bear it if—-“

“Hey, your secret’s safe with me, baby,” Holtz teases, miming zipping and locking her lips. 

Erin blushes at the term of endearment, despite the fact Patty probably calls her it on a daily basis. It’s much more firmly rooted in her dialogue than it is Holtzmann’s, and the glint in her eye is different too. All things considered, she can’t decide if this is the best or worst person to have found out her secret.

“You really can’t sleep here for a week though,” Holtzmann comments, gesturing to the largely threadbare couch, “I could take you back to mine. If you’d be into that, of course,” she punctuates it with a wink, that makes Erin laugh uncomfortably, before adding, “I have a spare bed.”

“I couldn’t,” Erin stammers, feeling her whole face flush, “I wouldn’t want to put you out. Honestly, I’m fine here.”

“Erin, _sweetheart_ , either you’re going to jump in a cab with me and go back to my place, or I’m going to physically carry you there. Either way, I’m not having you sleep here by yourself.”

Erin doesn’t want to admit that the idea of being firefighter lifted out of the building by Holtz isn’t entirely awful, so she laughs awkwardly instead, and eventually gives in, agreeing to go back to Holtzmann’s apartment, but only after ensuring three times that she wouldn’t be an inconvenience, and that it would indeed be kept a secret. 

It’s only when she’s gathering her belongings that she catches a glimpse of the time and realises it’s 3:30 in the morning.

“What are you even doing here this early?”

Holtzmann shrugs, “couldn’t sleep. You know - machines to make, havoc to wreak. The usual.”

Something about her expression makes Erin think she isn’t telling her the whole truth, a rare moment of vulnerability that she hasn’t seen since the night Holtzmann made her toast in a bar in Brooklyn, but she decides not to question it. Holtzmann, though outgoing on the surface, has always been a somewhat private person, and Erin is already about to invade that privacy; she doesn’t want to overdo it.

-

Holtzmann’s lab is the sort of place where you don’t want to stand too close to anything for fear of it blowing up. To the untrained eye, a lot of what she keeps on and around her series of desks looks like junk, often found by rummaging through a dumpster, but Erin has learnt to know better than to attempt to throw any of it. In fact, she’s hesitant to so much as touch anything without Holtzmann’s permission. Whilst Holtz is surely a much more touchy-feely person than Erin has ever been (the Kevin thing aside), Erin has quickly noticed that she doesn’t like to be touched unless it’s on her own terms. Not that she ever says as much, but Erin’s noticed the way she flinches at unexpected contact in a way not entirely dissimilarly to herself. Erin thinks that in the months they’ve worked together, she’s beginning to uncover the mystery of Jillian Holtzmann bit by bit, perhaps even moreso than the rest of her colleagues.

If the lab is anything to go by, Erin anticipates Holtzmann’s apartment to be something of a junkyard. Certainly nothing like her own spotless and polished (and full of cockroaches at present but that’s beside the point) apartment. Still, when they pull up outside it and Holtzmann insists on shoving her own money through to the cab driver, Erin can’t help but feel a sort of anticipation twisting in the depths of her stomach at being allowed into the other woman’s private space.

Erin is still dressed in her pyjamas, though she did have the foresight to replace her fuzzy slippers with a slightly more appropriate (but not by much) pair of heels. The cold night air is making her skin prickle, even as she wraps her arms tighter across herself, waiting for Holtzmann to unlock the front door.

To Holtzmann’s credit, when she finally gets the front door open (she has three separate locks and Erin doesn’t know whether she should be suspicious or impressed by her surprising attention to safety - she certainly doesn’t seem that bothered at the firestation), the place doesn’t instantly smell of either burning or mould which were the two things Erin was dreading. In fact, the hallway is fairly inconspicuous. Normal looking, even. Grey walls, dark flooring, and an end table that is home to two different pairs of glasses with yellow lenses, and a bunch of keys that Holtzmann deposits there in a swift movement.

It’s actually sort of… nice?

Holtzmann shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot, obviously waiting for Erin to say something, or at the very least finish taking in the apartment building. Erin is sure she’s given away her thoughts from the look on her face. It isn’t like Holtz to look so uncomfortable, when she’s usually so forward and outgoing, and Erin marks it down as another data point. Another piece of supporting evidence for her hypothesis that Holtzmann is a lot more private than she lets on.

(Not that that is an actual thing because that would be inappropriate, and Erin doesn’t spend that much time theorising about Holtzmann. She barely even thinks about her, really.)

“So, this is the place,” Holtz says, grinning, “the grand tour, m’lady?” she asks, holding out her arm with a goofy expression.

Erin links arms with her, and tries to ignore the way her pulse always starts thumping far quicker when she’s in close contact with her, like she sets all her nerve-endings ablaze. It’s comforting at the same time, walking through the apartment, Holtzmann describing things in a faux tour-guide type voice, cracking silly jokes just to make a sleepy Erin smile.

The apartment itself is something of an Aladdin’s cave. Erin thought that the lab was bad enough for its heaped piles of metal and wires, but every nook and cranny - aside from the hallway, it seems - has a box overflowing with parts and tools and papers. Design plans on graph paper - the kind she used at college - are spread across surfaces and stuck to windows, but in some crazy way, it doesn’t seem disorganised like it does back at the lab. There’s a kind of organised chaos vibe to it. Weird artefacts sit on shelves, alongside retro games still in their boxes, with labels with messy handwriting pressed along the sides. Some sort of game console is on the dining room table, taken apart, and half affixed to an old polaroid camera, some sort of strange ongoing project that probably only Holtzmann understands. It’s sort of like stepping inside the mind of a genius, Erin decides, struggling to take it all in.

It couldn’t be further from the minimalistic haven her own apartment offers her.

“May I show you to the presidential suite, m’am?” Holtzmann asks her, after what feels like an age of silence. She hooks her arm through Erin’s, and ushers her towards the only door they haven’t opened yet. 

Unlike the rest of the apartment, this room is small and tidy. The bed - somewhere between a single and a double like it hasn’t made its mind up - is made up with what looks like a child’s duvet cover: a bright graphic of a nebula in pinks and greens and blues on a black background, with a mis-matched striped yellow and white pillow. Erin glances at it and then at Holtzmann, who looks a little like she’s wishing the ground would swallow her whole - a look that is entirely foreign on her.

“It’s not as uh fancy as you are probably used to, but it’s more comfortable than the couch at the fire station, I promise.”

“It's perfect, thank you,” Erin says, sincerely, placing her large weekend bag on the floor at the foot of the bed.

“I’ll leave you to sleep. You need anything, gimme a call. I’ll only be next door.”

Erin nods, slipping out of her shoes and pulling back the covers on the bed. She sits down, and takes in a deep breath, surprised when the scent that hits her is so familiar, though she’d never really identified it before.  
 “Oh, Erin?”

She looks up at Holtzmann expectantly, again surprised to see a faint look of discomfort on her features, before it shifts again.

“Good night,” Holtz whispers, slipping out and closing the door behind her.

-

Erin wakes before her alarm and for a split second she forgets she isn’t in her own bed. Then she remembers, and can’t help but feel a smile drift across her features. She snuggles deeper into the duvet, feeling sort of embarrassed as she presses her face into the pillow, taking in a deep breath. There’s a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach, like she’s about to be caught doing something wrong, a feeling she hasn’t really experienced since she was a child and sneakily reading in bed after lights out. She feels stupid. It isn’t like she’s actually doing anything. She’s a grown adult, for christ’s sake, why is she acting like a giggly teenager?

She slides out of bed and checks her hair in the mirror to the side of the room. It’s only then that her eyes flicker to the rest of her surroundings. The mirror has photographs and ticket stubs and pages from notebooks with doodles and paragraphs of messy writing tucked into the edges of it, a familiar piece of tape with HOLTZ scribbled across it over a crack in the corner. Erin feels a lump in her throat. She glances at the desk, noticing the piles of books in cardboard boxes, the large notebook open on scribblings for some kind of containment unit, a pen sat in the margin, like it could have been left there any time.

Erin has a sinking feeling in her stomach as she pads out of the bedroom. It’s still early, and she doesn’t want to wake Holtzmann up, flashbacks of awkward sleepovers at Abby’s and her habit of always waking up long before her friend flooding back to her. She tiptoes through to the living room, where her suspicions are confirmed.

Holtzmann is lying on the couch with a worn out looking blanket draped over her, her arm hanging over the back, her head tilted back, quietly snoring away.

“Oh, Holtz,” Erin mumbles, suddenly feeling insanely guilty for not realising sooner.

In Holtzmann’s tour of the apartment, there hadn’t been another bedroom.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am SO sorry this has taken me so long to update, I really got into a funk with this which I'm finally climbing out of. This is going to alternate POV from chapter to chapter, and I've already half-figured out chapter three so it shouldn't be such a long gap. Thank you for being patient.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” Erin says, perching on the couch, furiously gripping a cup of coffee with both hands.

“I knew you wouldn’t go for it,” Holtz responds, shrugging. She’s trying to play it off as nonchalance, but she isn’t her usual bouncy, overflowing-with-confidence self. She’s been on the edge since groggily waking up to Erin awkwardly hovering around her. _Of course Erin’s an early riser._

Erin frowns, “well, no, I wouldn’t have let you sleep on your couch, just so I didn’t have to sleep on a couch at the fire station. It’s counter-productive.”

There’s something akin to annoyance on Erin’s face, and Holtzmann can’t quite figure it out. She’s used to Erin looking flustered, faking irritation at Holtz when she’s being particularly reckless or flirtatious, but there’s always a smile creeping into the corners of her mouth. Now, she looks genuinely annoyed. Not angry - they haven’t fought over it, though persuading Erin to let her make the coffee had been a small feat - but not happy, nonetheless. It’s difficult to gauge.

“You lied,” Erin finally says, exasperated.

“How else was I going to get you into my bed?”

Erin’s face turns scarlet, and whilst that’s sort of the effect Holtzmann wanted, she can’t help but feel guilty because this time it isn’t the same as their cat and mouse game that they’ve been playing for months, it’s different. Erin looks like she’s about to call the whole thing off.

“Look, I didn’t mean to upset you, I just didn’t like the idea of you up in the firehouse all by yourself—-“ she starts, but she knows right away that she’s said the wrong thing from the look on Erin’s face.

“I can look after myself, Holtz,”

Exhaling, Holtzmann looks seriously at her, “I know. God, I know better than most.”

The image of Erin appearing from behind that burst balloon with her proton wand over her shoulders has been seared into Holtzmann’s memory forever. That and her kicking serious ghost ass have provided her with more than enough material for fantasising about. She’s never seriously believed that Erin can’t handle things by herself, even if she does frequently give her the first choice of weapon, even if she did give her her own swiss army knife. It’s more about Erin believing she can do it, than Holtzmann not thinking she’s capable.

“Please, just stay tonight. You can take the couch if it’s really that big a deal.”

She can’t work out the expression on Erin’s face, but eventually she rolls her eyes, biting out an: “okay fine.”

Holtzmann resists the urge to punch the air, opting for playing it a bit more casual and grinning at her instead, before reaching across to ruffle her messy morning hair, earning another glare from Erin. She sinks into the couch and tosses the rest of her espresso cup back, alternating between staring into her empty cup, and glancing at Erin, who is picking at her own mug, absent-mindedly. Holtz, not for the first time, wishes she knew what she was thinking.

“We ought to get moving,” Erin says, finally, being drawn out of whatever half-sleep she’d lapsed into, and sounding more like herself, “I’ve got a theory I want to go over before Abby gets in.”

-

By lunchtime, Holtzmann has noticed that Erin’s been downstairs most if not all of the morning. They arrived before the others, and where she usually would be scribbling away at her desk, close enough that Holtz could watch her without it having to mean anything, she’d never appeared after making her morning coffee. Holtz had spent the morning tinkering with an alarm, but without the distraction of Erin, she’d, ironically, got very little done.

She can’t help but think Erin might be annoyed with her. She’s never been good at figuring out other people’s feelings, but the evidence seems to point in that direction. Erin hasn’t spent this much time away from her desk on the second floor… since Holtzmann installed it for her. Its correlation with the events of the morning can’t be a coincidence.

When Patty comes up to tell her she and Abby are going out to grab lunch, and, without a hint of subtlety, suggests Holtzmann might like to go downstairs and keep Erin company, Holtz is suspicious that they’ve noticed the tension too. She puts aside her equipment, warily peeling one set of goggles off her face, leaving a smaller set resting on her head. Waiting until she hears Abby and Patty’s chatter dissipate, the slam of the front door closing, Holtz forgoes taking the pole, unusually choosing to take the stairs instead.

Erin’s hunched over a desk, tapping the end of a biro against her top teeth, glaring down at a pile of papers. Holtzmann can’t stop herself from staring, drinking in the curve of her jaw, the way her hair is falling around her face, loose from her ponytail, the flicker of her eyelashes as she concentrates. She feels a lump forming in her throat. If Erin is mad with her, she isn’t sure how she’ll bear it. She’s terrible at coping with hostility as it is, let alone from someone whose opinion is so important to her.

“You know, Erin, bud, you might be a genius in your field, but I’m a bit concerned that you don’t know how to make a cup of coffee,” she says, finally, sounding more confident than she feels. She hates the way it comes out. It’s better than sounding bitter, though.

Erin’s head jolts up quickly. She obviously hadn’t heard Holtzmann on the stairs. Frowning, she puts her pen down and sits up straight.

“Huh?” she doesn’t sound angry, just frustrated.

Holtz swings up onto her desk, “Well, this morning you went into the kitchen saying you’d be up after you’d made a pot and… four hours later,” she gestures to where Erin’s sitting, the space between them.

Pinching the bridge of her nose, Erin sighs, “right, sorry, I got distracted down here.”

“Ah, Patty have another run in with the barbecue sauce guy? You know I hate to miss those stories.”

“Something like that,” Erin mumbles, gazing back down at her work, pen poised. Holtzmann frowns. So, she is annoyed. Holtzmann doesn’t really know how to deal with that. She’s good at saying stupid things, only realising she’s touched a sore subject hours or days later. She’s good at making people laugh when they’re in a bad place, but she doesn’t think that will work with this, either. She doesn’t know how to deal with this painful awkwardness between them, when usually just being near Erin makes her feel all warm.

Erin is so hard to figure out.

Holtz leaps off the end of the desk, fully prepared to go back upstairs. It’s probably better to just give her some space. Before she reaches the foot of the stairs, she pauses.

“I’m sorry.”

Erin’s frowning when she looks up, “what for?”

Awkwardly shifting from foot to foot, Holtzmann shrugs. She’s terrible at this, at being serious. She rubs the back of her neck, “making you mad?”

“Holtz,” Erin sighs, “I’m not mad at you. Why would I be mad?”

Holtzmann just squints - she hadn’t actually figured that part out yet.

“I’ll come up after lunch. I’d love to see what you’ve been working on,” Erin says, smiling a genuine smile that reaches her eyes, “you can stay down here a while if you like?”

-

Erin keeps her promise. They spend the early afternoon talking over the (minimal) progress Holtz has made on a paranormal warning alarm (sort of like a smoke alarm, but for spirits), Erin scribbling down a few ideas, and Holtzmann tinkering about sort of aimlessly. Despite the warmth of her smile and the tone of her voice, which are both entirely normal factors, Erin’s behaviour seems a little off, but Holtzmann can’t place it. It’s like they’re a fraction of a second out of beat from one another, where they usually tick along perfectly in sync. When she places a hand on the small of Erin’s back, and notices her visibly flinch, quickly taking her hand back, Holtzmann can’t help the spark of hurt that flashes through her. Erin, to her credit, doesn’t say anything, only momentarily stumbling over her rambling thoughts, before pushing on.

Eventually, Erin settles into her corner of the lab, and Abby comes upstairs. She and Holtzmann are quickly so submerged in work (Holtzmann building and Abby guiding, holding things still, reciting numbers and measurements and details from a leather-bound notebook, chastising Holtzmann for her lack of precaution with safety), that the thought of Erin quickly fades from Holtzmann’s mind. It’s like old times, almost, except with a higher budget, and therefore more things to go wrong, and when she hears Erin’s laughter, a sharp, musical sound out of nowhere, it breaks her out of her concentration immediately. She almost drops the hunk of metal she’s grappling with.

“Holtz!” Abby’s voice drags her attention back just in time, hands over hers, guiding their project safely back to the desk.

“Oopsy-daisy,” Holtz grins, but even she notices how strained her voice is. 

She glances across at Erin, who looks away from Patty - who Holtz hadn’t even noticed arrive - the hints of a smile still on her lips, though she looks concerned, and she feels her heart stutter just a teeny tiny bit.

“Y’all gotta be more careful in this lab. You can’t go about acting like fools. I told you to have something other than chips for lunch Holtzy, what have I told you about—-“

“Yeah, yeah, no nutritional value,” Holtz waves Patty away, “I hear you.”

“Don’t make me send you home. You know I’ll do it.”

She rolls her eyes, “okay, _fine_ , I’ll go grab a sandwich or something, _Mom._ ”

Holtzmann tugs her gloves off and dumps them unceremoniously onto a pile of junk on her desk, leaping from her chair in a swift movement that looks almost choreographed. She notices Erin staring at her, and can’t help herself, winking in her direction, slow and calculated, enjoying the blush that rises from her throat upwards.

“I have half a salt-beef bagel left from lunch if you’re interested,” Erin blurts, and Holtzmann doesn’t even really like cold meats, but she’ll take it if Erin’s offering. She isn’t really hungry anyways.

She goes to collect the bagel, still wrapped in its paper bag, neatly cut into halves in a way that makes her wonder whether Erin used a ruler to do so. Patty pushes off from the desk, and Holtz is vaguely aware of she and Abby talking as they head downstairs, a murmur of something about more coffee.

“I was thinking,” Erin says, and Holtzmann is overcome by how shy she sounds, and how hard it has become to swallow, her mouth full of bagel.

“That’s dangerous,” she jokes, once she’s finished her bite.

Erin rolls her eyes at her, but the corners of her mouth turn up. “Maybe we could order from that Thai place tonight?”

Holtzmann chews thoughtfully, “I thought Patty hated Thai?”

“The place is around the corner from your apartment,” Erin says, hesitating, “I’m almost done with this… I figured we could get some on the way there. My treat.”

The feeling that crashes over her is stupid, really it is, because Erin’s coming to her apartment to stay over, on the couch, because her own apartment is being fumigated, and that’s the situation, nothing else, but Holtzmann suddenly feels very hot under the low overhead lighting. She smiles at Erin, desperately hopes her appearance isn’t giving anything away, and nods.

“Sure, that sounds great.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been really ill this week so I'm sorry it's taken me longer than I would have liked to be posting this chapter. I'm sorry it's quite a short chapter I just wanted to get back into updating. I really appreciate everybody's lovely comments. Please feel free to send me prompts if you fancy it, by the way. I'm always looking to expand my writing.

It’s a weird feeling, like everything’s changed somehow, and Erin can’t quite get her head around it. She ends up in a funk over it all day, which is fine to begin with, because she thinks she’s always been pretty good at putting on a face, pretending everything is fine when it isn’t, but it quickly becomes obvious that people have caught on. Patty raises her eyebrows when she finds her sitting on the ground floor, at her old desk that had been all but abandoned. Abby asks her three times why she hasn’t gone upstairs (she never has been good at tact). Erin smiles it off. “It isn’t a big deal,” she says, “I just thought I’d spend some time down here. It’s quieter.”

Erin sits at her desk and she stares over her computer screen at Kevin, and she wonders when exactly she stopped gravitating toward him. She can’t remember when she stopped paying attention to him and only him, can’t recall the last time she laughed awkwardly at him, or found a reason to touch him, or said something nerdy and embarrassing in front of him. It doesn’t feel like anything changed - or it _didn’t_ feel like it - but now that she’s realised, she can’t stop thinking about it, picking it apart in her head when she should be working on something substantial.

She doesn’t know why she doesn’t go upstairs, or why she avoids Holtzmann. Or, she does know, but she isn’t willing to accept it, thinks that maybe if she ignores it, it might go away (she’s practised that her entire life and, okay, it never works, but she still holds out hope anyway). She thinks about the night before, about that funny warm feeling in the pit of her stomach when she saw Holtz lying there on the couch in the morning, and it makes her head spin. She tries to drown it out with coffee and formulae and new theories but she can’t concentrate on anything.

When Holtzmann touches her, briefly, without thinking, an unimportant moment in a series of moments that shouldn’t mean anything, Erin flinches. She hates herself for it, because she sees the barely contained look of hurt drift over Holtzmann’s features, a split second before a grin forms, not quite reaching her eyes, and _god, how could she be so stupid?_ How has she not seen this all along?

Erin contemplates telling her it’s a bad idea for her to stay over tonight, but she anticipates another one of those looks, and she can’t bring herself to. Their conversation that morning was bad enough. And besides, a large part of her wants to stay over.

It’s just a temporary arrangement. A friend, letting another friend stay over whilst their apartment is out of action. That’s all it is.

It’s all so middle school that it makes Erin want to laugh. Or cry. Possibly both.

She tries not to think about how ‘shall we get Thai food?’ translates to ‘I like you. God, I think I like you. Like, like you like you, and I don’t know how to deal with that because you’re, well, you, and I’m an awkward mess’ in her head as she says the words, sure they’re coming out garbled. Holtzmann looks confused until she clarifies that it’s just the two of them, and Erin can’t stop hearing the words ‘DATE. IT’S A DATE’ in her head even though it is decidedly not a date. And then that’s that. They’re having Thai food at Holtzmann’s apartment, and Erin’s staying the night.

Making their excuses for leaving to Abby and Patty feels oddly thrilling, like the secret they’re keeping is more than ‘Erin’s apartment has roaches and she doesn’t want you to know’, but Erin blinks that feeling back. It’s 6:30pm, a perfectly reasonable time to leave for the night. She leaves ten minutes after Holtzmann, and they meet back at her apartment, Erin clutching a bag of food, Holtzmann already sprawled out on the couch. Two bottles of beer sit on the coffee table.

Erin hesitates before moving towards the kitchen area. There’s a pile of dishes in the sink, a stack of empty takeout boxes precariously balanced on the edge of the counter, but it isn’t as bad as she had half-expected it to be. Still, she gives the fridge a wide berth, afraid that she might find some kind of experiment growing in there. She opens cupboards and drawers until she finds two plates and two forks. Holtzmann watches her through the arch separating the two rooms, a faint look of amusement on her features while Erin carefully divides the food up.

“What’s the fancy occasion?” Holtzmann asks, accepting her plate of food.

Erin frowns, “huh?”

“We don’t usually use plates for take out - at the firehouse, I mean,” Holtzmann points out, the corner of her mouth lifting into a smirk, accented by a dimple.

Blushing, Erin dips her head, sinking into the couch and drawing her plate onto her lap, “I don’t know, I just thought it would be nice?” Erin says, lamely.

Holtzmann shrugs, piling food into her mouth in the least dainty way possible. Erin’s noticed before that she has a funny way of eating, separating each food into a separate pile on her plate, and she was careful to arrange the thai food in the same way, ensuring the noodles didn’t touch the egg rolls, and so on. Whether Holtzmann notices this conscious decision, she’s not sure.

“I’ve got a documentary on sea otters waiting on my DVR if you’d be into that kind of thing,” Holtzmann suddenly asks, around a mouthful of food.

Erin nods, wiping her mouth on a napkin, “sure that sounds good.”

The awkwardness between them melts away as they settle into a familiar rhythm, commenting on the antics of the animals on screen and trading leftover food. It’s nice. More than nice, actually. Sitting so close to Holtzmann, watching her whole face light up as she watches the otters on the small television slipping in and out of the water, holding hands as they drift up stream, Erin can’t help but feel oddly content. She’s learnt yet another new thing about Holtzmann tonight. It’s sort of thrilling, pulling back layer after layer of Holtzmann’s personality, learning tiny things about her that she guesses nobody else knows. She’d have never predicted that the woman would be so enthralled by furry little creatures on a tv screen, but she is, her eyes practically glued to it.

“Their faces when they open their mouths - have you ever seen anything cuter?” she gushes, and Erin is struck by two things: 1. the fact she never thought she would ever hear Holtzmann ‘gush’ about anything (except maybe her own inventions) and 2. that yes, she has seen something cuter, and it’s right in front of her.

She blushes at that thought, trying to swallow it down, but she can’t stop the feeling of adoration that’s swelling through her as she watches Holtzmann imitate the otter on screen, mouth slightly open, tongue sticking out, arms short and grabby. She looks so adorable that Erin feels almost overwhelmed.

After the documentary ends, they watch the tail end of an episode of Cake Wars, and then channel surf until they find an old Doris Day movie. It’s only fifteen minutes or so before Erin is stifling a yawn, the food long forgotten. At some point over the course of the evening, she’s wriggled her way into Holtzmann’s side, resting her head on her shoulder, Holtzmann’s arm draped around her, blonde hair tickling at her face. She knows that they end up in this position fairly frequently at movie night and that nobody thinks anything of it, but with just the two of them, it feels different. Erin remembers earlier in the day when she’d flinched at making contact with Holtzmann. Now, listening to the steady thump of Holtzmann’s heart under her head, and her gentle laughter along with the movie, Erin feels herself drifting off to sleep before she can even try to stop it.

-

Erin groggily wakes up to someone cursing. She blinks her eyes open, but the room is in darkness and it takes her a moment to make out Holtzmann’s figure in the dark, hovering over the floor. She stretches her body out along the couch, realising that although she’s still in her work clothes, a throw has been tucked carefully around her.

“Holtz?” she murmurs, sitting up a little.

“Damn, I didn’t mean to wake you,” comes the whispered reply, followed by a rather sheepish grin, “I tripped over one of my projects.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“S’okay, sleeping beauty,” her eyes glisten in the dark, “though I do think you might like to change out of your pant suit and into your… flannel pant suit.”

Erin rolls her eyes, easing herself out of the couch one limb at a time, and stretching her arms over her head. She’s wearing a blouse and jeans, but she’s not about to argue with Holtz. She grabs her weekend bag and blearily heads for the bathroom, pausing to ruffle Holtzmann’s hair on the way past. She doesn’t really know what possesses her to do that; it’s an automatic reflex, and as soon as she’s in the bathroom she glares at herself in the mirror for doing it.

Once she’s changed and has brushed her teeth, she moves back into the living room, just as Holtzmann appears from the bedroom in her own pyjamas. Or, what constitutes as pyjamas in Holtzmann’s world, which is a pair of boxer shorts and a crop top that might have originally been a school PE shirt, but has been hacked to pieces. Erin tries not to look at all the extra flesh it exposes, her mouth suddenly feeling dry. They rotate awkwardly around each other.

“Just gonna brush the old gnashers,” Holtzmann explains, gesturing for the bathroom door.

“Right, of course,” Erin agrees, laughing nervously, “well, good night.”

“Night, Erin.”

She disappears into the bathroom, and Erin heads back towards the couch. In the time she’d been gone preparing for bed, Holtzmann has made up the couch with a spare duvet (this time with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bedspread) and a pillow. Erin climbs under the covers and sighs, closing her eyes. She hopes tomorrow things will be less weird, but she sort of doubts it.


End file.
